Today we have a special interview from Gamescom to share with everyone! Gazimoff from ZAM was kind enough to conduct an interview in our stead. He spoke with both John Lagrave (lead game producer) and Ion Hazzikostas (lead encounter designer) about Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's future, and more.

Read on to find out what feature has been the most challenging for these developers, where they're drawing their inspiration from, and other exciting tidbits to tide you over until Mists of Pandaria's launch!

In your opinion, what was the hardest part of developing Mists of Pandaria as an expansion?

Ion Hazzikostas: I think overall, just meeting the challenge that we set for ourselves when we set out to create this, we set out to offer more content than ever before, in terms of breadth and depth. We have eighteen raid bosses this patch. We have well over a thousand new quests, over two hundred max level daily quests, as well as entire new systems - scenario system, pet battles, challenge modes.

We’ve said that we came up with a very ambitious feature list for ourselves, and just rising to the challenge and getting it all done to the standards we expected of ourselves, as well as our players ahead of us, that was a hard challenge.

John Lagrave: So for me, that’s all good, right, but actual work... (laughs)

Our pet battle system, which is the notion of you take your companion pet, and you face off with me, or AI, and our pets battle. It sounds trivial, but it’s actually incredibly difficult, because we’re establishing a turn based system into our real-time game, and we didn’t support any of that. The engineering work was tremendous, just a ton of work. We had several guys, full time on it for months on end, doing that work. And people are like “That has to be trivial, you just have two pets and one goes, the other goes. How simple is that?” Tremendous amount of work. There was a lot of sweat involved in that.

The largest games convention on Earth is happening in Cologne, Germany from August 15 to 19 this year. Blizzard Entertainment is excited to announce our presence at gamescom 2012, where visitors will have the chance to witness the world premiere of the World of Warcraft®: Mists of Pandaria™ opening cinematic. The latest creation from Blizzard’s cinematics team will be shown on giant screens at our booth on Thursday, August 16, the first fully public day of the event.

We’re also pleased to announce that this year we’ll be showcasing World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, Diablo® III, and StarCraft® II: Heart of the Swarm™! Don’t miss your chance to experience the games first-hand and to meet members of the development teams. In addition, be sure to get creative and join in our famous dance and costume competitions.

Visit the Blizzard Entertainment booth in Halle 6.1 (B21) at the Koelnmesse in Cologne and prepare to be epically entertained. For more information on gamescom, check out the official site.